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Podio Pricing Strategy

Podio is an online platform that helps teams to communicate, collaborate, organize, track progress and effectively work together. Companies use Podio for collaborative management of sales, projects, portfolio, recruiting, and a lot more. Podio brings features of popular social networks to the work environment to help teams get work done.

The homepage of the Podio website is very simple and has a large “Sign up for free” button in the middle of the page encouraging potential users to sign up. Anyone can sign up with a valid email address and the sign up process is very fast and straightforward. I would say that signing up with Podio was really pleasant customer experience and have no objections in this respect.

Podio offers an unlimited free trial. The trial is fully functional and has all features of the full version. It’s not limited to use for only 14 or 30 days as most of the trial versions. The Podio trial can be used for unlimited time; however, it is limited to only 5 internal users and unlimited number of external users. Internal user is a person with an email hosted at a company’s domain (e.g. @microsoft.com), external user is a person with a free email account (e.g. @gmail.com). If a company needs more internal users they need to start using the paid version.

The paid version requires a monthly subscription fee of $9. Companies can purchase annual plans for their teams that come with 20% annual discount. Users have to use their work email (hosted at a company domain) to log into Podio. That’s how Podio figures out how many users a company uses and bills them accordingly. A company can invite an unlimited number of external users (using Gmail, Yahoo mail or any other email) for free. That’s what I find kind of strange about their pricing model; the product can be used for free without any restrictions. You only pay if you want to use the product with your work email. The product can be basically used for free with all the features and full customer service and support if you use your free mail. This pricing model encourages a lot of people to sign up as they gain all the benefits while saving on subscription fee if used with a free mail. The pricing of the paid version is very competitive; similar product offered by SalesForce comes with a lot bigger price tag.

This pricing model has been working out for Podio and they have been acquired by Citrix last year. Podio is used by millions of users around the world.